The Case for Politics and Public Health: 2017

• Published in: American journal of public health (1971) 2017-06, Vol.107 (6), p.825-826
• Main Author: McQueen, David V
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: AJPH Book & Media; British history; Climate change; Cost control; Disabilities; Epidemiology; Governance; Government; Health care; Health care expenditures; Health care industry; Health care policy; Health disparities; Health services; History; Income redistribution; Industrialized nations; Medical personnel; Medical research; Medicine; Obligations; Politics; Population; Public health; Social factors; Social sciences; Socioeconomic data; Socioeconomic Factors; Socioeconomics
• ISSN: 0090-0036; 1541-0048
• DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2017.303777

Policy Press; 2016 320 pp, $22.00 ISBN-13: 9781447330363 Socioeconomic factors affect the public's health,1 but so do policy and politics when they 2,3 converge in governance. Medicine, as a social science, as the science of human beings, has the obligation to point out problems and to attempt their theoretical solution: the politician, the practical anthropologist, must find the means for their actual solution"4^421,5 The Dutch social epidemiologist Johan Mackenbach has explored this notion in terms of present-day public health and notes that there is considerable controversy among epidemiologists and public health professionals about how far one should go in influencing political processes (http://bit.ly/1U7Yji7). Much of this history is well covered and summarized in Bambra's book with special attention to the British history of the Black Report of 19886 and the Acheson Inquiry of 1999.7 These reports, which preceded the more epidemiologically based WHO report, carefully laid out the role of social factors and their contribution to the inequities in the health of the British population. [...]the 2013 NAS report documented nine majorareas of health disadvantage in the United States, ranging from adverse health outcomes to disabilities, but, more importantly, it pointed out their policy implications and the evidence-based policies that could address them at the national, state, and local levels (p. 235). [...]it could be argued that there is something to learn from other advanced industrial countries that have managed to provide universal health care at considerably less cost than the US limitedcoverage high-cost health care system and have produced...